Apple’s iPhone App Store celebrates its first full year in business on Saturday, it also celebrates 1 billion downloads of the more than 55,000 applications available on its site.
In the past year, Research in Motion Ltd., maker of the BlackBerry, Microsoft Corp., maker of the Windows Mobile OS, Google Inc., backer of the Android mobile platform, and Palm Inc., maker of the Palm Pre and WebOS, have all launched application storefronts.
The App Store concept “is the future of the software market,” said Rob Enderle, analyst for the Enderle Group. “It changes the model. We live in an online world and App Store anticipates at some future point that we won’t be buying software in a store.”
To be fair, Handango Inc. holds the title as the original application store for smartphone downloads, analysts noted. The company celebrated its 10th anninversary in January, and said it was offering 140,000 applications with more than 100 million downloads, supported by almost 1,000 devices.
Ironically, the fact that Handango works with so many devices could dilute its impact, while Apple’s store has taken on more value partly because of its exclusive connection to the successful iPhone.
Enderle and other analysts noted that most of the applications in the App Store are games or social networking applications, but a significant number of the 55,000 apps are useful for health and business professionals. More than 1,000 applications are devoted to business productivity, while more than 600 can be used by doctors and patients to monitor health conditions or check quickly for drug interactions.
Apple has consistently shown an interest in fostering third-party development, and has even added more than 1,000 application programming interfaces (APIs) to its iPhone OS 3.0 software, including the ability to make purchases from inside an application.
Google Inc seems to be more careful in approving applications for its storefront, the Android Market, Enderle said. “Google seems to be more flexible with what kinds of applications they allow, but they don’t allow low quality crap on their store,” he said. “Apple has too much stuff that shouldn’t be in the store and unevenness regarding what is allowed.”
But that criticism aside, Enderle and others say the App Store has popularized the concept of quick and easy wireless access to applications that will promote the expansion of cloud computing.
“The App Store concept appears to be successful on each other platform that has tried it,” Enderle noted. He also expects such retail online services to expand beyond smartphones to other platforms, such as home entertainment systems, home automation systems and automobiles.
“There will eventually be online retail promotions on whatever device an App Store is connected to,” Enderle said. “It’s redefined what a platform is.”
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